The intervening day was an extraordinarily busy one for Detective Carr. He spent the time running down the history and official record of the Kirven murder case, a crime which had been committed some ten months previously. The details of this case, with which he renewed his acquaintance, may be summed up briefly as follows:
At about ten-thirty in the morning Mr. Kirven was found dead in his room with his throat cut from ear to ear. A blood-stained razor was lying beside him. The body was discovered by his housekeeper, who had come to his house to do the cleaning.
That it was murder was plain, for there were signs of a furious struggle. Nor did the identity of the murderer remain long a mystery. William Lesser, the business partner of Mr. Kirven, disappeared, and for apparent reasons.
The books of the firm of Kirven & Lesser, brokers, appeared at first to be in good order. But an investigation revealed that several transactions involving large amounts had not been recorded. Bonds and securities which had been intrusted to Lesser by the firm’s clients never reached the bookkeepers for entry. It was estimated that Lesser had absconded with some two hundred thousand dollars.
The direct cause of the murder was not known, but it was assumed that Kirven had discovered his partner’s treachery, had accused or perhaps threatened him and had thus brought on a quarrel.
The police, in tracing Lesser’s history, discovered that three years previous to the crime he had entered Kirven’s office as a clerk. He made good so quickly that Mr. Kirven took him into partnership. No clue to any fact of Lesser’s life before he entered the employ of Mr. Kirven could be found.
The heirs of Mr. Kirven, a sister and a nephew, offered a reward of five hundred dollars for the capture of Lesser. But months of zealous searching bore no result. The police had only an old photograph (found among Mr. Kirven’s effects) and the descriptions given by employes and clients to guide them. After several months, official interest in the case smouldered and finally lapsed altogether.
Detective Carr was one of the department’s famous camera-eye men. No disguise had as yet fooled him. He was able to penetrate almost immediately any artificial changes of appearance. He had never met the missing Lesser personally, but he had, of course, seen the pictures which had been published in the papers.
His first glance had convinced him that the man who was running a dental office on Forty-eighth Street under the name of Dr. Perry was the man who had disappeared under the name of Lesser.
And this in spite of the fact that Dr. Perry’s appearance differed from Mr. Lesser’s in several important respects. Lesser, to judge by his picture and the descriptions of him, was a man about five feet six in height, normal weight, clean shaven, light complected, with a thick crop of blond hair.
This description corresponded with Dr. Perry’s in only one respect, the height. Dr. Perry was stout and at least thirty pounds above normal weight. He had a black mustache and goatee and was dark complected. Further, the hair on his head consisted only of a black fringe, which ran around his temples and the back of his neck. Under the circumstances, it was not strange that Detective Carr’s conviction was a bit shaken and that he decided to keep his suspicions to himself until he had made a thorough investigation on his own account.
Neither of Mr. Kirven’s heirs had ever seen the missing Lesser. However, the detective dug up two Kirven & Lesser employees and two of the firm’s clients who had met Lesser personally a number of times. One of these men agreed to go up to Dr. Perry’s office and have his teeth cleaned. The other three were posted by the detective at different times in the restaurant where the doctor took his lunch.
Three of the men were positive that Mr. Lesser and Dr. Perry were not the same person. The fourth said:
“Well, the shape of his head is a little like Lesser’s, but you couldn’t get me to swear in court that they were the same person. No sir, not me.”
Detective Carr then tried to get at the mystery from a different angle. He looked into Dr. Perry’s past history. He discovered that Dr. Raymond K. Perry had graduated from the Horn Dental College in New York in 1914. The doctor, in accordance with the State law, had renewed his license every year. All of which was perfectly regular.
But — the doctor had rented his office on Forty-eighth Street ten months ago — or at just about the time that Mr. Lesser disappeared — and Detective Carr could find no record of his having practised his profession any time before that. Further, the records in the city bureau of taxes disclosed that Dr. Raymond K. Perry owned real estate to the value of one hundred and forty thousand dollars on East One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Street and that the property had been purchased at about the same time the doctor opened his dental office.
Dr. Perry lived on Claremont Avenue. No one at his address could shed the faintest light on his past career. He had rented the apartment ten months ago and had always been prompt in the payment of his rent. He never had visitors. When he rented the apartment he had remarked that he was living in Yonkers, but desired to live in the city in order to be closer to his office.
The detective consulted the city directories and the telephone books for the last seven years. He examined the membership lists of all the city and State dental societies. He telegraphed the national organization. He visited all the dental supply houses and manufacturers of dental instruments. The investigation yielded the name of Raymond K. Perry but twice, and these Perrys proved to be senior and junior, with an office in Brooklyn. The Raymond K. on Forty-eighth Street was not related to them.
All this would not have been unusual if there had been evidence that Dr. Perry had lived in another State before opening his office on Forty-eighth Street. But the doctor had said he had moved down from Yonkers. That a man practising the profession of dentistry and worth upward of a hundred and forty thousand dollars could leave an absolutely recordless existence did not seem probable, and yet the most painstaking search had revealed but one fact in the career of Dr. Perry previous to his opening the Forty-eighth Street office. That fact, as has been stated, was his graduation from the dental college in 1914.
Detective Carr’s weaknesses did not include the lack of persistence. He had great faith in his camera-eye quality and Dr. Perry’s past — or seeming absence of a past — only stimulated his activities.
The detective began the tiresome task of canvassing those dental offices of New York City which were large enough to employ additional dentists. Carr spent eight hours every day for seven weeks at this work; but finally his quest bore fruit.
The payrolls in Dr. Kiekbush’s office showed that in January, 1918, a Dr. Raymond K. Perry had been discharged for drunkenness. Nobody in the Kiekbush office recalled the appearance of Dr. Perry. Detective Carr, however, considered it significant that only one month later — February 1918 — Mr. William Lesser had entered the employ of Mr. Kirven.
The chain of evidence, though circumstantial, removed all doubt from the detective’s mind.
Still, although Detective Carr was perfectly convinced of Dr. Perry’s guilt, he knew that his evidence was not conclusive enough to persuade a jury. The fact that he could offer no direct identification was the weakness of his case. He felt that he had two lines of attack open to him. There was a chance that he could find some person or persons whose memory for faces was good enough to enable them to identify Dr. Perry as Mr. Lesser. His other hope lay in a direct attack upon the doctor himself.
This attack, of course, would have to be subtle. The doctor would have to be “squeezed,” prodded and annoyed by a series of seemingly innocuous questions and insinuations into betraying himself by some word or act. The work on the detective’s teeth was to be finished in three weeks. There were to be two appointments, each of an hour’s duration, every week. Detective Carr was to have six hours more of personal contact with the suspect.